The school chose 10 of its year 6 pupils to pair with 10 pupils from St Monica’s Primary School in North Parramatta to create a circus-themed mural for a new children’s activity area at Westfield North Rocks.

Teacher facilitating the project, Patrick Vidot, said students would use Adobe Illustrator to draw and colour age-appropriate images, and build graphic design knowledge that would be useful for their future science projects.

‘‘All the kids who work in that group are getting an idea about the design process —What’s a design brief, who are the target audience,’’ he said.

‘‘That use of technology makes students aware of copyright as well, getting them to understand you can’t just trace or copy and image, you’ve got to tweak it slightly, make it new, make it original.’’

Year 6 teacher Helen Nafranowicz said the project was the first that allowed her students’ work to be seen by the whole community.

‘‘Often with the work that we do we don’t have a massive audience potential,’’ she said.

‘‘Parents and staff are great, but this is an audience that they can see is the community valuing their work.

‘‘We could have said ‘Okay, lets get someone who is an artist to draw on a piece of canvas and have the students paint it’ but that would have taught them nothing at all.

‘‘For them to be able to choose what images will go on there, sketch and upload those images and see how they can be transferred from an original drawing to a professional piece of work is excellent.’’

Catholic Schools Week is on March 9 - 15. Find out how schools in The Hills will celebrate: